TheKompany.com: A New Approach to Linux Business - page 3

The Building Blocks for Linux

September 25, 2000

By
Dennis E. Powell

The way to beat Microsoft's products, says
Gordon, is to produce better products and to make them freely available.
One place where the Redmond behemoth is vulnerable will be exploited, he
hopes, by the flowcharting program he's working on.

"I've spent a lot of time looking at MS Office.
For one thing, they don't include Visio. Visio is frightfully expensive.
It's also incredibly robust, and people don't often get to the huge number
of features that are there. By including that, we're going a huge step
beyond what you can get out of MS Office or StarOffice, and with the database
stuff--I've found the database stuff in StarOffice to be awful, personally,
and MS Access is pretty good. It's not bad at all. I also liked Paradox
for Windows as well."

Another is the revival of KDB, and ReKall,
which is designed to make the MS Access user happier than ever before.

"With this MS Access thing, we've got KDB.
One of my main guys has been doing the major work on that. He's got the
definitions and everything pretty much set up for KDB. That will be the
generic layer as part of the desktop that you can embed in pretty much
anything. You can put queries inside of a KSpread spreadsheet, and you
can mail merge out of a database in a KWord document, that kind of stuff.
That will be our database layer for what we're calling ReKall, which will
be the end-user, lightweight DBMS system, like an MS Access. MySQL, PostgreSQL--those are too much for the officeplace. I know what people use in the
office. Access has always been the bane of IS, because there's some yahoo
in some department who builds some system that nobody else knows about
and they're running the whole department out of it, disconnected from everything
else.

"As part of KDB, we have an I/O slave for
Konqueror that's a database browser, and that already works. So you you
can enter databases as URLs and do simple queries and browse datatables.
It uses the plugins that are part of KDB to give it support for whatever
databases you need. Nobody else does that on any platform. That's pretty
cool--we're excited about that.

"The big thing with everything we're doing
is, we're trying to reuse stuff even more than people are now, and really
make everything interoperable. With Kivio, we're trying to leverage some
things we can use with the visual IDE that we're working on and also with
the database that we're working on."

The scripting language that appears throughout
is Python VeePee, which Gordon describes as "Visual Basic for applications."

Back to Kivio. They've already gotten it
to work everywhere it might be useful.

"What we've done with that is kind of cool.
We've made it part of kparts, so it works inside of KOffice, so we've already
done things like embed it inside a spreadsheet, a KWord document, and so
on, so you're going to have flow charting. Now the plugin architecture--we've got some interesting stencils where you can read through, say,
database structure and automatically generate a chart of the relationships
or generate a UML from header files, things like that. There are some pretty
cutesy things that we plan on doing with that.

"We should have a technology preview release
of Kivio in the next few weeks--that's getting real close."